Solochon, Pamphamer and Pamphalon
The Holy Martyrs Solochon, Pamphamer and Pamphalon, soldiers, who suffered at Chalcedon
Martyr · d. c. 298
Commemorated 17 May — Martyrdom at Chalcedon under Maximian
Solochon, Pamphamer and Pamphalon were Egyptian soldiers of a Roman legion moved to Chalcedon on the Asian shore opposite Byzantium, put to death there about the year 298 in the persecution of Maximian and Diocletian. Ordered by their tribune, Campanus, to sacrifice to the idols with the rest of the unit, the three refused; Pamphamer and Pamphalon died under the tortures, and Solochon, who survived them, was hung by one hand with a weight fastened to his leg and had a writing-stylus driven through his ear. Carried half-dead to the house of a Christian widow, he strengthened the faithful who gathered to him, prayed, and gave up his spirit. Their memory is kept on May 17.
Egyptians in a legion at Chalcedon
The three martyrs were Egyptians — the synaxarion is explicit for Solochon and the Greek day-list extends it to all three — serving as soldiers in a legion that was transferred, in the ordinary way of the late Roman army, from the Egyptian frontier to Chalcedon in Bithynia. Their commander was a tribune named Campanus, and their sufferings fall in the reign of the emperor Maximian, colleague of Diocletian in the East, whose edicts against Christians in the army preceded the general persecution: the purge of the legions, in which soldiers were required to sacrifice on pain of degradation or death, is the setting of a whole class of the military martyrdoms of the late third and early fourth centuries, and this is one of them.
Campanus assembled his men and required them to offer to the gods. Most complied. Three stood out: Solochon, Pamphamer and Pamphalon. Their refusal was not a private scruple but a public one — the confession of soldiers before their own officer and their own comrades — and it was punished accordingly.
The tortures
The account preserved in the synaxaria is unusually circumstantial about what was done to them, and its details are of the kind that recur in the Egyptian and Bithynian passions. The three were beaten without mercy. An attempt was made to force upon them the blood of the sacrifices, their mouths being prised open so that the libation might be poured in, so that they might be counted as having partaken whether they consented or not; they resisted, and the attempt failed. They were dragged over sharp stones until their bodies were torn.
Under this treatment Pamphamer and Pamphalon died, and so received their crown in the place of judgment itself. Solochon did not die. Campanus, provoked, ordered him hung up by one hand, with a heavy weight tied to one leg, so that the whole strain of the body fell on a single arm; the synaxarion says he hung so for about three hours, and that his arm was pulled out of its socket. Still he confessed Christ. At last the tribune took a writing-stylus — the sharp bronze graphion every officer carried for his wax tablets — and thrust it into the martyr's ear, and gave him up for dead.
Repose in the widow's house
Solochon was left where he lay, or cast out as a corpse. Christians of Chalcedon took him up and carried him to the house of a Christian widow, where he was tended; and the synaxarion records the small, homely detail that he ate food there, so that it was clear he was alive and in his right mind. The faithful of the city came to him, and he spent his last strength in exhorting them to hold fast the confession of Christ — teaching, as the account has it, out of what he had just endured. Then he prayed, and surrendered his soul to the Lord. His companions had died in the torture-place; he died in a Christian house among Christians, and the Church remembers the three together.
Feast and commemoration
May 17 (church date; New Calendar civil May 17; Old Calendar civil May 30), always within the Pentecostarion, since Orthodox Pascha cannot fall later than May 8; the movable office of the year takes precedence over the fixed one. The three martyrs are kept universally on this day, in the Antiochian, Greek and Slavic calendars alike, and are listed second in the Greek day-order after the Apostles Andronicus and Junia. The commemoration is a simple one, without vigil, served with the common of martyrs and the proper stichera of the Menaion. No relics or shrine of theirs is recorded, and no local cultus at Chalcedon survives; their memory rests entirely on the synaxarion.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thy martyrs Solochon, Pamphamer and Pamphalon, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from thee our God; for possessing thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Soldiers of the earthly king, ye were found soldiers of the King of heaven, and ye would not be defiled with the blood of the sacrifices; wherefore, having borne the stones, the weight and the piercing, ye were crowned as three athletes of Christ, O Solochon, Pamphamer and Pamphalon.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
The three are painted as young soldier-martyrs, beardless or lightly bearded, standing in a row: not in armour, as a rule, but in the tunic and mantle of the martyr-confessors, each holding the cross of his witness, and sometimes with the military belt or chlamys to mark the calling in which they suffered. Where the scene of the passion is shown, it is the hanging of Solochon by one hand with the weight at his leg — an unmistakable and unusual motif — or the pouring of the sacrificial blood into the martyrs' mouths. In the printed Greek menaia they appear in the small woodcut for May 17 beside the Apostle Andronicus.
No pre-1900 icon of these martyrs has been located for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, which would ordinarily supply such an image for a minor commemoration, covers only September to February and therefore contains nothing for May 17.
Disputed questions
- The date. The calendars place the martyrdom in the reign of Maximian (284–305) without narrowing it further; the conventional date given in the Slavic synaxaria is c. 298, and some Greek sources give the wider bracket 286–305. This entry follows c. 298 and indexes the martyrs to the third century accordingly, while noting that a date in the Great Persecution after 303 is equally possible on the evidence.
- The names. The two companions' names are unstable in transmission: Pamphamer appears also as Pamphamir and Pamphamerus, and Pamphalon as Pamphylon in the Greek day-lists. The Greek order of the names is usually Pamphamer and Pamphalon before Solochon; the Slavic and English calendars put Solochon first as the principal figure, and this collection follows the latter.
- Egyptians at Chalcedon. The detail that Egyptian soldiers suffered in Bithynia is sometimes treated as a confusion, but it needs no explanation: legionary detachments were routinely redeployed across the eastern provinces, and several martyr-companies of this period are made up of men serving far from home. The transfer is, if anything, a mark of circumstantial plausibility in the account.